- Looking for a smart power strip that won't break the bank?
Today we're gonna look at two.
One of them is the Mengyasi smart wifi power strip,
and the other one is the Quirky smart Z-wave power strip.
Stay tuned.
Hi again.
John Stone, the DIY smart home guy from the channel
that's all about helping you make
smart home automation decisions
for your affordable smart home.
If you're new to this channel, there's a number
of videos right here that will help you figure out
where to start with your smart home.
I have a series going on how to start your smart home
where we talk about home automation hubs,
lighting, and a lot of other topics,
so I encourage you to browse around.
I also wanna thank those of you
that have been subscribing for a while
or have been watching for a while.
We really appreciate it over here.
Also we wanna do a special shout out
to those of you that are supporting us
over here on Patreon.
There's a link to Patreon down in the description below.
Power strips have to be one of the most frustrating things
that I have around my house.
Because I have a smart home,
I'm always looking for the right power strip
that'll integrate nicely into my smart home setup.
So today we're gonna talk about two smart power strips
that I've found that I think are worth putting
in your smart home.
One of them is going to be the Mengyasi four outlet
plus four USB smart power strip,
and the other one's going to be this Quirky Z-wave
four-outlet power strip.
First up is gonna be this four outlet Mengyasi.
So one of the things that I like about this is
each one of these four outlets here
is independently controllable,
meaning each one can be switched on and off independently.
The USB ports, on the other hand,
these are controllable, but all four turn on
and off at the same time.
So that gives you a total of five different power sources
that you can control through the app,
which is pretty cool.
And again, I do like that the USB is controllable,
just kind of a bummer that you can't control
each one independently.
The other thing that I like is the spacing
that you have between each one of these.
Now if you put something too big in it,
it is gonna come over here,
but you still have room there to put a normal plug in.
If you're gonna put some wide stuff on,
you might wanna be putting it on each of the sides.
Now I just happen to have a couple of other,
these are some wifi plug in modules
that I've reviewed in a different video.
There will be a link to that right here.
I reviewed 12 different plug in modules.
Overall, the footprint of this thing
looks like it's about eight and a half inches wide,
and it's about four inches tall.
So it's not a bad footprint for this.
It is a little bit wider from top to bottom
than I like, but you do pick up those USB outlets.
So overall, eight power sources
off of this thing is pretty nice,
so I'll live with the size there.
So let's compare that to that Quirky power strip.
Now as you can see, the width of this thing
is quite a bit longer.
When it's spread out full end-to-end,
you are over a foot there.
You also have four outlets.
These two outlets over here on the end,
these are not controlled,
meaning that they're always live.
And these two here, I don't know if you can tell,
well you can see those lights.
These two here are independently controlled,
so you can control those separately.
However one of the things that I don't really care for
about this Quirky power strip is the fact that
there's no USB outlets on it.
I happen to use two of these down in my master bedroom,
and we use them to control night lights
and the phone chargers,
and if they had the USB ports on them,
that means I could charge my phone,
and I could still have outlets.
Now another nice thing about this Quirky power strip
is the fact that these outlets themselves
are pretty wide apart.
I do like the distance between these things.
Also, this Quirky strip will turn and bend,
so if you have really awkward-shaped plug ins,
something that has a transformer on it,
you're gonna be able to get all of those in.
You're not gonna sacrifice any of the outlets
because you have something plugged into an adjacent outlet.
And frankly, I think that that's pretty cool.
Both of these power strips have another really cool feature,
something that I like.
But what I'm talking about here is the master on/off.
So in this case, if you push this switch,
it's gonna turn everything off,
including your USB ports.
Push it again, it's gonna turn them all on.
And the Quirky has essentially the same feature.
Speaking of those big and bulky plugs
that would go into the wall,
the master on/off switch is this thing right here.
And, I have it unplugged,
but this is also master power
for the entire Quirky power strip.
So you have that manual control,
which is really important to me.
The other thing is, when we look
at this Mengyasi wifi power strip here,
this does have an app,
and that app does have a skill
that will allow you, excuse me,
that app will have a skill
that allows you to get it into the Amazon Echo.
It also works for the Google Home.
So another form of manual control would be
the voice automation connection
so you can control it with your Amazon Alexa.
Now the Quirky power strip, on the other hand,
this has to go into a home-automation hub.
This will go into something like a Wink Hub,
a Vera, or a SmartThings.
So, because it's Z-wave, it does have to have a hub
where the wifi power strip doesn't have to have a hub.
But going into a Wink Hub or something like that
isn't a bad thing.
Again, if you wanted to check out my video
about how to start your smart home,
I'll talk about why a hub is a good idea.
Now, once you have this into a Wink Hub,
that's how you would get it in to have
your manual control or your voice automation control
through the Amazon Echo or the Google Home.
So this Mengyasi smart wifi power strip
does come with its own app.
It's called the Jinvoo app,
and it is available on both the Google Play
and the iTunes store.
It's a pretty decent app.
It seems to do everything that you'd want
a wifi controller app to do,
in terms of controlling your smart home devices.
Now the Quirky power strip,
it actually doesn't come with an app at all
because it integrates into a smart home hub.
It'll integrate into something like your Wink Hub
or your SmartThings, so there is no specific app
other than your smart hub app,
and that's what you would use from an app perspective
to control the Quirky power strip.
So, not a drawback really.
I like that because it does integrate it
into all of my other devices that are
in my smart home ecosystem,
because it's all controlled through a single hub.
That's one of the reasons why I prefer
the Z-wave Zigbee hubs over just going
with a random assortment of wifi devices
that are generally all from different manufacturers.
Now, I'm not going to be using the Jinvoo app.
If you happened to catch the video
that I made where I reviewed the 12 different
smart home plug in modules,
you'll remember that I came across a couple of them,
one of them was this MartinJerry
and the other one was this Voion,
and the Voion also had its own app,
but I didn't use the Voion app.
I actually put this into its own app,
which was this Smart Life app.
Now, the Smart Life app is also available
for the Android and the iOS.
And what I like about the Smart Life app is
it'll bring in a lot of different wifi products.
Alright, so let's take a look at this Smart Life app.
As you can see, we already have put into the app
that smart power strip.
We have that Voion plug,
and we have that MartinJerry plug.
Now, all of those are different manufacturers,
and each one of them is working very nicely
inside the Smart Life app.
If we go in and look at the power strip itself,
you can see that it automatically brought
in the USB and the four switched outlets.
And as I said, each one of those
can be controlled independently,
which is something I really like about this power strip.
Now bringing everything into the central app
makes it feel very hub-like.
So if we go back over here,
we can look in, hit this plus sign,
and there are just tons of devices
that this Smart Life app supports.
I really hope I have the time to go through
and start digging in to quite a few of these.
So I'm not trying to make this a commercial
for the Smart Life app,
even though I really do like it.
Again as I say, I'm very encouraged by it.
So when we go over and look at that smart power strip,
you can see, we'll turn off that first outlet
right there, you'll see that Voion plug in module.
That thing went dark there.
Turn it back on, you'll see it start to power up
through the power cycle.
So pretty cool with what you can do with this thing.
The next place that we'll go is,
let's switch over and look at the Quirky power strip
inside the Wink Hub.
When we take a look at the control,
you can see that we have control out of the app
for each one of those.
Little lights are going off and on there.
So you do get the full control
over the system out of that Wink Hub there.
And the other nice thing is you can integrate it
in with robots, so you can put anything
from that Quirky smart power strip into your robots.
And the other nice thing is
because it's in my Wink Hub,
it goes into Stringify naturally.
So let's switch over to the Amazon Echo,
and you'll see that we've go the Wink Hub
in the Echo already,
and if we scroll up here a little bit,
you'll see that Smart Life app as well.
We've got Stringify in there,
so we can do a whole bunch of stuff through the Amazon Echo,
which is pretty sexy if you ask me.
So let's go over to that first switch
where we have that Voion plugged in.
Computer, turn switch one on.
- [Computer] Okay.
- Alright, so the Alexa commands work just fine,
and we have the same capability over here
on the Quirky power strip.
And we'll do the very same thing.
We'll say, computer, turn Kirana's night light on.
- [Computer] Okay.
- I have no complaints with either of them.
I do plan to expand my usage of this wifi smart power strip.
I'm very happy to say that I like this module.
I do recommend it.
There's a link to it in the description below
in this video as well as
that Quirky Pivot Power Genius as well.
Thanks for watching.
Don't forget to subscribe, and don't forget to click like.
Over here are a couple of those videos that you might enjoy.
But thanks to all of you that already support me
over on Patreon.
That's patreon.com/diysmarthomeguy.
Until next time, cheers.
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